


Roots and Bones

by Twitchiest



Series: Apocalypse Girl [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, F/M, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Present Tense, Violence, brief berserker mode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 07:09:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4597494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twitchiest/pseuds/Twitchiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sentiment is infectious. It's the only reason she has a lump in her throat. The only reason a discarded, useless emotion rises inside her, making her want to scream and rage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Roots and Bones

_**One**_  
  
They take her back to their base. It's an old stone manor house, with fireplaces and strong walls. They give the two of them a room, and space at their table.  
  
Before dinner, the first of her twelve comes to the room.  
  
"This guy isn't dead," he says. "Want him to be?"  
  
Her lover backs up against the wall.  
  
"Not now," she says.  
  
Her lover says, "Alex."  
  
"One," her first says. "We started using numbers after we escaped. It's our thing. The order she found us in."  
  
"Sentimental," she says, tone mild.  
  
He shrugs. "You taught us how to survive."  
  
_**Two**_  
  
Dinner is good food, surrounded by chattering voices, friendliness, warmth. She answers questions, volunteers dry comments, and listens.  
  
They've thrived since the world ended. They found their own guns, and wear leather armour. They have food and contacts in a local, struggling farming community.  
  
"We missed you," the newly named Nine says, next to her. "You would have loved the raids."  
  
Sentiment is infectious. It's the only reason she has a lump in her throat. The only reason a discarded, useless emotion rises inside her, making her want to scream and rage.  
  
She eats stewed deer until it goes away.  
  
_**Three**_  
  
One shows her around, room by room, floor by floor. She listens, and learns, and at the end he opens a door and says, "This is your war room."  
  
Power she doesn't have to steal. Control she doesn't have to take.  
  
She stands in the middle of a room full of maps, and pins, and threads, and says, "You haven't got a plan." Fact.  
  
"We're surviving," he says. "It was enough."  
  
"Is anyone in the area doing more than survive?" She casts her gaze over abandoned, dead places preserved in ink.  
  
"No," he says.  
  
"Then we'll be first," she says.  
  
_**Four**_  
  
At the bottom of one of the carts is a black box. In the black box are a stack of folders. She gathers everyone around the dinner table and shares them out.  
  
She found it in the base in the city, the day before the power went out.  
  
They're plans, maps, the locations of archives, storerooms, and bunkers across the country. A handful are nearby. One has seeds.  
  
"We'll need people," she says. "Support. Farmers."  
  
"Done," says Seven, a man with early grey hair.  
  
"Done," echoes Ten, thin and blond.  
  
Her lover flips through a folder and avoids her gaze.  
  
_**Five**_  
  
Time passes.  
  
She walks the local trade routes with a convoy, watchful. She wanders the land and learns it, every singing woodland and abandoned field. Twice she comes across camp sites, and once hides from a whip-thin trio with scars, wearing dull tattoos, armour, and hungry looks. She goes free of her ghost. He's found himself in the middle of a plan to brew potato wine in the manor stables.  
  
It's the only apology he's ever going to get.  
  
He holds her, when she's there to hold, clings to her like she's keeping him afloat.  
  
The manor creaks, at night.  
  
_**Six**_  
  
One day she reaches the top of a ridge and finds some of the military.  
  
They have a vast area cordoned off with six-foot barbed wire that's tattered and torn. Tents stretch out. Most of them are ruined. A central building still stands, and behind it sits a long grass-covered mound, a concrete pillar on top.  
  
She sits up on the ridge and sees only tired, thin, people. At night she haunts the darkness of the tents, visits the mound, runs her fingers over the words carved into the monument.  
  
A tomb for thousands and their plans, lost to disease.  
  
_**Seven**_  
  
Summer moves in, and so do people, small drifting groups. Everyone pitches in to build fields for the donkeys, for animals they've found and corralled. Dairy cows add cheese and milk to their diet. Someone brings a group of dogs, with puppies, drawn by promise of food and warmth.  
  
Farmers come to size up the estate, and they bring ploughs and horses with them.  
  
She meets everyone, learns their stories, their skills. She remembers faces, matches them to names, makes them all like her.  
  
In autumn, she leads them to fields with self-seeded crops. They will not starve, this winter.  
  
_**Eight**_  
  
In winter, fourteen gather in the war room and plan.  
  
In winter, her lover starts to meet her gaze, and she is more than willing to be tumbled into bed on long nights.  
  
There is a gathering outside on what Four thinks is the winter solstice. They spare the wood for a small bonfire and sing, raucous, into the night.  
  
In winter, a man at a campfire tells her about a gang of men twenty strong, from a prison deep, dark and cold.  
  
She thanks him for the news, and leaves.  
  
The knife, her knife, on her belt feels heavy.  
  
_**Nine**_  
  
At night, her lover breathes her name against her skin like a prayer. He is the only one that uses it.  
  
Everyone else calls her boss.  
  
He whispers it with his arms around her, body tight against her back.  
  
She wants to scream at him, wants to tear him apart until he begs for mercy she doesn't have. She wants him to hurt her, to be the fire that burns her to nothing.  
  
She burned a world.  
  
The world never helped her.  
  
She lays still, and fills her being with ice.  
  
Her lover prays to her at night.  
  
She listens.  
  
_**Ten**_  
  
Winter is turning to spring when everything goes wrong.  
  
The new gang have taken up a cluster of houses on the road to the seed storehouse, a scout reports. They're going to have to pass through their territory on the way.  
  
One sends an embassador. The embassador comes back with an escort of five, and one of them is Tred.  
  
Five leads the talks. She's diplomatic.  
  
She and Tred watch each other across the room. He's given up his gun. No one asked her to go without her knife.  
  
Her instinct whispers that he knows, but he says nothing.  
  
Why?  
  
_**Eleven**_  
  
A week after the agreement is made, they pack. They take the carts. Nine of her twelve, her lover, and her.  
  
Tred sends someone to meet them on the road. He is offering them a meal, a place to sleep that night. Tighter bonds of friendship.  
  
There is an invisible noose around her neck. She is a cold, still, thing. She agrees.  
  
They eat, but only after their guests. They drink, but very little. They laugh and talk, until Tred beckons at her from a doorway. She rises to her feet and slips away to a quiet, bright-lit side room.  
  
_**Twelve**_  
  
It's a store room, boxes piled high.  
  
She wants to laugh.  
  
Tred says, "I see the guilty live well."  
  
She tilts her head.  
  
"I should have killed you in the Pit," he says.  
  
She raises an eyebrow.  
  
"Tell me," he says. "What did it feel like when you ended the world?"  
  
"When she what?" says One.  
  
She spares a glance. One's in the doorway, and two others. Her lover pushes past, stopping inside. His eyes are wide, his lips pressed tight. His hand hovers near his concealed gun.  
  
"Didn't she tell you?" Tred says. "Why she broke out of prison?"  
  
_**Thirteen**_  
  
The world blurs. Her head swims. Tred is talking and she is standing and she feels a cliff in front of her. Tred tells them everything. She wants to hurt him, she wants -  
  
\- she wants -  
  
\- she doesn't know.  
  
Her lover says, "You saw the security tapes?" and Tred says,  
  
"I don't need to. I know her type. Angry at the entire world. She had means and motivation. Look at her, boy. What do you see?"  
  
"Who have you told?" her lover says, quiet.  
  
Tred smiles. "No one."  
  
It takes a moment, a moment too long, for the words to register.  
  
_**Fourteen**_  
  
Tred doesn't know. He hasn't got proof. He can watch her body, read her face, but it's all just instinct.  
  
Anger burns through her ice.  
  
She turns away. Her lover is watching, One and Six and Seven. She will not lose control in front of them.  
  
There's a crowbar on a nearby box.  
  
They're surrounded. He has twice the force she brought. Hers is better.  
  
"Is it true?" Six says.  
  
She regards Six. The other woman flinches.  
  
Her lover looks away. He knows her too well.  
  
"We're yours," One says. "Always."  
  
She reaches. Her fingers close around the crowbar.  
  
_**Fifteen**_  
  
It feels good to beat a man to death. He's stronger, she's faster. Fury is burning her.  
  
She barely hears gunfire for her own screaming.  
  
When she stops, he's lying on the floor, bloody, broken. She's cold. Empty. She's shaking.  
  
She discards the crowbar, rests her hand against her knife's hilt. It steadies her.  
  
"Feel better?" her lover says, quiet.  
  
She is a monster, she is the bloody goddess of missiles and death, and she has no anger left.  
  
"I wouldn't be here if you hadn't been there," she says.  
  
"I know," says her guilty ghost. "We found marshmallows."  
  
She laughs.  
  
_**Sixteen**_  
  
She washes blood off her hands.  
  
They take what they need and pour petrol over the rest.  
  
She is silent for the next two day's travel, as they walk to the seed depository. No one speaks to her. No one shoots her. When they go inside the nondescript, isolated building, she sits outside with one of the dogs leaning against her.  
  
The others carry out crates with cooling units attached. Crop seeds. With their generators, they can keep them preserved. With their farmers, they can rebuild.  
  
She wonders if it's enough, then dismisses the thought. She will make it enough.  
  
_**Seventeen**_  
  
"Here," her lover says, bending down. He has an inch-wide tube in his hand. "Seeds. A hardy flytrap. They reminded me of you."  
  
She takes it.  
  
He leaves.  
  
She raises the tube to the sun and turns it, watching the black mass of tiny seeds shift. She doesn't know how to care for a flytrap but, she thinks, she can learn.  
  
She pushes up onto her feet. "Come on," she calls out. "We haven't got all week."  
  
"I don't see you helping," One shouts back from inside.  
  
She smiles, slipping the tube in her pocket. "I'm on watch, aren't I?"


End file.
